Wednesday, January 25, 2017

Already the wheels seem to be coming off the Trump bus

Heh. this is interesting. The ostensible headline on this New York Magazine story is, "Trump Aides Keep Leaking Embarrassing Stories About How He Can’t Handle Embarrassment", but when I used my blogger bookmarklet to link to it, the title came up as Trump Aides Can’t Stop Blabbing About How He’s a Madman:

The president is a 70-year-old child whose TV time must be closely monitored — because any news story that upsets his ego will trigger a temper tantrum followed by irrational demands that his indulgent, overwhelmed guardians will be helpless to refuse.

Or so Donald Trump’s aides keep confiding to the nearest available reporter.

On Sunday, one of the president’s confidantes told Politico that his staffers have to “control information that may infuriate him,” a task made difficult by the fact that the leader of the free world “gets bored and likes to watch TV.”

Worth reading the whole thing, and following the link to this story, which is about how Trump is like a character from a Twilight Zone episode, a petulant six-year-old boy with superpowers who terrorizes a small midwestern town. I watched the episode. It really is a chillingly apt metaphor.

I'm gonna go with "infantile buffoon" and "fascist" definitely. "Criminal" I'll give a qualified "maybe" (hard to say without seeing his tax returns, but you gotta wonder what he's so desperate to hide). "Mastermind", well, I think the jury is still out. He definitely has a talent for bamboozling people. He won the election fair and square (well, as fair and square as it gets in American politics) against all the odds. That is no small achievement. Whether or not he can actually govern remains to be seen. (God, I hope not.)